Subscribe to this blog

Follow by Email

Nigerian Women Are Being Trafficked Into Sicily At A Rapidly Increasing Rate

This Nigerian woman, who preferred to remain anonymous due to the shame associated with prostitution, was trafficked into Sicily and has struggled to rebuild her life.

Disheveled, barefoot and bleary-eyed, the Nigerian girls are some of the first to walk off the boats. A dream realized; they arrive in Europe — though the scene is anything but romantic.

Caskets are carried off, carrying those who didn’t survive the two-day journey across the Mediterranean, from Libya to the Sicilian port of Palermo. Babies wail and those sick and burned from the effects of the gasoline mixed with saltwater stumble towards the medical tent.

The Nigerian girls are given a plastic bag containing a liter of water, a piece of fruit and a sandwich. They're ushered to a vinyl tent for “vulnerabili” — the vulnerable ones.

For at least 30 years, Nigerian women have been trafficked into Europe for sex work, but numbers have spiked recently. In 2014, the trickle of a few hundred women a year grew to nearly 1,500. The following year, it increased again to 5,600. In 2016, at least 11,009 Nigerian women and girls arrived on Italian shores.

These women used to arrive on planes with visas. Now, they come the “back way” — the smuggling route that has developed across Africa to bring hundreds of thousands of Africans to Europe.

Women make up a smaller percentage of total African arrivals to Europe, and aid response for them has been slow and misguided. Although the International Organization of Migration estimates that 80 percent of Nigerian females coming to Europe are trafficked, aid workers have no way of telling those seeking opportunity from those forced against their will. They hand out flyers warning against trafficking.

Time is of the essence: If officials can establish trust, girls who have not been trafficked may be less likely to become ensnared in sex work once they are in Europe. And those who were trafficked are more likely to supply details that reveal that they have been trafficked, allowing the IOM to refer them to Italy’s national anti-trafficking network, or local prosecutors, who can help them get international protection.

In the best-case scenario, they are placed in a safe house run by nuns or an NGO, which is supposed to house them for up to three years and try to integrate them into European life with school and job training, with the goal of becoming independent.

That’s the ideal scenario — but it rarely happens. Safe houses are built for a dozen women — there aren’t nearly enough to take in the thousands of women arriving.

Traffickers know this.

Before leaving for Italy, Nigerian traffickers give the girls and women a phone number for a madam, and tell them to call as soon as they arrive. Madams are older Nigerian women, sometimes former prostitutes themselves, who have climbed the organizational ranks. A younger male is also involved, working for the madam by following, watching and accompanying the young women.

After arriving, the Nigerian women are taken with other asylum-seekers to facilities around Italy, built to house them as they await their documents. Teeming with people from Nigeria, The Gambia, Eritrea and elsewhere, many of whom have been there more than a year, they’re allowed to come and go, and use cell phones.

“Madams actually recruit inside the big immigration centers,” explains Tiziana Bianchini, who works for Lotta Contro l’Emarginazione, a Milan-based organization with an anti-trafficking mission. This means that girls who may not have been trafficked run the risk of falling into criminal networks once they are in Italy.

Peace is one teen girl who, in 2013 at the age of 17, migrated by boat to Sicily and was brought to CARA of Mineo, the largest refugee camp in Europe. Located in Sicily’s eastern province of Catania, the center, once an American military base, houses more than 3,000 men and women. It has become notorious for its dubious finances and for giving residents cigarettes instead of the payments they are entitled to under Italian law.

While she still lived in the camp, Peace stopped a Nigerian man on a street nearby, and asked to borrow his phone. She dialed the number she had been told to, and spoke to the Nigerian woman on the other line. Within days she was a sex worker. “Once you make the call, you’re off. You never go back to the camp,” she says.

I met her earlier this year in a small room in Sicily where church services are held, several months after she left the street.

She’s an energetic, fast-talking, smiley young woman, whose youthful stature is nonetheless marked by a distinct confidence. She wears her hair up high, with a long braid hanging down her back, bouncing as she walks and talks in the glaring Sicilian sunlight.

Peace isn't her real name — it's an alias we agreed to use because she still lives in fear of her traffickers, or that she’ll be deported. Or of repercussions for her family because she didn’t finish repaying her debt.

Trafficking officials would call her a typical victim: She grew up in Benin City, in the heart of Nigeria’s poor, rural southwestern Edo State, a major source of trafficked sex workers in Europe. She's the eldest girl from a large family — and older girls are the most likely to be trafficked. Her mother died when Peace was 16, and her father “was not caring.”

She decided to leave, feeling the pressure of needing to help her family financially, and escaping from a situation that was hurting her.

When a woman approached her, telling her she was beautiful and asking if she wanted to go to Europe, Peace agreed. She knew she’d have to work on the street, and she knew she would need to pay the woman 30,000 euros once she arrived in Europe. She completed what Nigerians call the “juju oath,” an animist, spiritual contract in which the girl agrees to be brought to Europe, and binds herself to her debt with bits of her pubic hair and blood.

The ritual is taken extremely seriously — and violation is considered justification for murder of a girl or her family.

“Back then, I just thought, f*** it,” said Peace.

Languishing in the camps

The lax oversight at these migrant centers has led to calls for a different response to migrant arrivals in Italy. The centers, which Italians call “welcome homes” and the people inside call “camps,” were Italy’s stop-gap solution to provide recent arrivals with housing as they awaited their documents or the result of their applications for international protection.

A process that was supposed to take a couple of months now lasts years, while applicants languish in overcrowded centers, often in the middle of nowhere.

“Italy was completely unable to create a national program to deal with the arrivals from Africa,” said Bianchini, explaining that the responsibility lies with understaffed and underfunded local governments, who end up outsourcing the oversight of these camps to private organizations, “making contracts with whoever.”

This means there is little oversight or transparency. Much of the staff operating these centers speak little to no English (nor French nor Arabic for that matter), the centers are overcrowded, and the people inside of them tend to be given little access to information on Italy’s legal system.

When I visited one center, many people asked me if they should try to get to France. Rumor has it that it's increasingly tough to cross the borders out of Italy.

“The Italian system of housing asylum-seekers is completely inadequate for victims of trafficking,” Bianchini added, noting that women in general, but especially victims of trafficking, require specific psychological and educational support that these centers are unable to provide.

Every so often, law enforcement officials in Italy decide it's time for a sweep and deport Nigerian women back to Nigeria, where they run the risk of being re-trafficked.

“Forcibly returning the girls to Nigeria would be another heavy violence against them,” explains Sister Valeria Gandini, a missionary nun who eight years ago founded Palermo’s Street Unity, a group of lay and religious volunteers who visit the women on the street each week. “Sooner or later, they will meet the same people who betrayed them and brought them to Europe the first time around.”

Deportation rumors often spur more women to run away.

Impossible to pay

Another young Nigerian woman who ran away from her camp, only to wind up on the street, is Favor — again, not her real name. When I met her, she had a big, warm smile beneath a fashionable knit cap.

Like Peace, Favor is from Edo State, though from the more rural area, outside of the city. Before she agreed to seal the oath, Favor asked the woman who approached her if she was going to Europe to "do prostitution." It was only once the woman assured her that she would be working in a shop that Favor agreed.

She was told the money would be easy to come by once she was in Europe.

When she first arrived at the madam’s house, Favor was exhausted. She slept for two days. On the third day, the woman said it was time to go to work.

In addition to the 30,000 euros she had to pay off, she would have to pay 80 euros a week for food, 250 euros a month for the rent, as well as the gas and electric bills. Favor was ready: OK, no problem. Just show me the shop, she said.

First, the woman took her shopping. They bought clothes that Favor says she “didn’t understand.” A few days later, the woman said she was ready for work. They took bus after bus, and then they walked. She found herself in the “bush,” standing on the side of the road. She was told to put on different clothes, clothes she had bought earlier with the woman, and that were now tucked inside the bag she had brought.

When it finally dawned on her what she would have to do, Favor cried. She cried all day, and for many days she refused to work. When she went home with nothing, the woman would beat her. After some time, she felt she had no choice, and she gave in.

In Palermo, women and underage girls like Peace and Favor work the streets among the trees lining the busy road of La Favorita, or along the trash- and urine-ridden streets around the port.

They are there six nights, or days, a week, depending on their shifts. As the months get warmer, the clothes get skimpier: see-through tights that reveal a lacy thong, shirts open to reveal naked breasts. They wear wigs directly from Nigeria that cost 20 euros each. Blessing (not her real name), a woman of tiny stature and boundless energy who works on a Palermo street, shows off her fake eyelashes, which can stay on for several weeks

Peace now shares an apartment with an Italian woman whom she helps around the house. In her room, she brushes her hair, smiles often and laughs a lot. She is candid but guarded about her experience working on the street.

“It all depends on the client,” she says. “Sometimes, those clients don’t even want sex so much as they want company, and with them, you try to be jovial, you make them laugh. But then there are the clients who don’t want to pay you, the clients who are aggressive. Those are the bad clients.” Peace can talk about it without showing too much emotion, but she is reluctant to go too deep. She would like to go back to Nigeria eventually, but for now, she feels pressure to make money, either for herself or her family — she wasn’t clear.

Favor's experiences were worse. Once, a client knifed her. Another time, two men who approached her gave her a bad feeling. “Via,” she told them. “I’m not working tonight.” “You must,” they replied, before slapping her and dragging her into a room in a local train station. She cried a lot as she told her story. When she came to, she said she asked the first person she found to bring her to the hospital.

After that, she decided to get out.

Getting out

The Street Unity group in the town where she was working had been asking her for months if she wanted out. Street Unity groups, like that established by Sister Valeria in Palermo, approach the girls offering medical support, and in the case of the religious groups, prayer.

The Nigerian women are extremely religious (there is no one in Nigeria, Peace once said, who can honestly say that they don’t believe in God), and prayer is often a source of bonding. Once the connections have been established, the groups can be a way off of the street — a difficult and uneasy step.

Sicily has a 22-percent unemployment rate, high even by Italian standards. The only jobs available to Nigerian women are in cleaning or taking care of the elderly or children. But these jobs require Italian language skills, and they don't come with guarantees of good payment or treatment.

As Sister Valeria sees it, "the women who are victims of trafficking, who have been forced into sex work for years, who are in the end destroyed, physically and psychologically — what future can they have here?”

Against all odds, Peace one day decided she would leave. It was a scary decision, because of the juju oath she had made back in Nigeria. Article 18 of Italy’s Consolidated Immigration Act provides protection and temporary residence permits to victims of trafficking who denounce their traffickers or madams, or who show visible signs of being in immediate psychological or physical danger.

But Peace, like many of these women, refused to take this route. Denouncing her madam or her trafficker would be the biggest violation of her oath. “I’m protected, in Europe,” she explains, “but I have to think about my family.”

Back in Nigeria, it would be easy for them to be killed or badly hurt. And, there is the fear of going crazy. She talks about her friend, Mary, who convinced a whole group of girls to denounce their madam. Mary has since gone “totally wacko” — a problem, Peace explains, that is not psychological but spiritual, linked directly to the effects of the juju oath.

Peace and Favor are moving on with their lives. Peace attends classes in Italian, sewing and cooking. She sings in her town gospel choir, and helps organize meetings in her church’s community, where she leads discussions about work opportunities and community empowerment.

Favor lives in a safe house in northern Italy. She is also taking Italian classes, and the operators taking care of her are working hard to find her job opportunities so she can be independent one day. Peace says she's thankful for her experiences. She feels she has grown, and says it's for this reason that she does not think of herself as a victim (though she admits that she can say this only because she is no longer on the street).

Favor, for her part, calls herself “a very big victim,” but she is looking forward, too.

Translate

Popular Posts

PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA (CIO EAST AFRICA)--“Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others,” a saying goes. When African Development Bank President Akinwumi Adesina laid out his vision to tilt the flow of capital into Africa by convening the first transaction-based investment forum, many did not see what was coming ahead.

One year down the road, the verdict is undisputed.

The three-day Africa Investment Forum ended November 9th in the South African capital exceeding the expectations of its conveners – The African Development Bank. Beyond participants’ commendations, a preliminary review of the meeting leaves room for much optimism.

The Forum highlighted a solid pipeline of projects and wealth of opportunities ready for investors. After a final review of all Boardroom projects, investor interest stood at close to US$40 billion, the organizers said Wednesday.

People pack the Las Vegas Convention Center on Thursday, Nov. 15, 2018, for the annual Marijuana Business Conference. Image: Chris KudialisBY CHRIS KUDIALISLAS VEGAS, NEVADA (LAS VEGAS SUN)--One step into the annual Marijuana Business Conference in Las Vegas and the massive growth of the industry is evident.

Small booths that used to squeeze into the Rio as recently as 2016 have tripled in size, offering CES-style presentations at the conference’s new home, the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Many of last year’s first-time show attendees are now among the record 1,100 exhibitors from 60 countries, having found their business niche in the exploding international market.

The convention, which just two years ago welcomed 10,000 industry members from across the world, is boasting more than 25,000 attendees this week. The three-day convention began Wednesday and concluded Friday.

Cassandra Farrington, CEO and co-founder of event host Marijuana Business Daily, said the show’s growth is largely…

DAKAR (REUTERS) — When Moustapha Dieng came down with stomach pains one day last month he did the sensible thing and went to a doctor in his hometown of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso's capital.

The doctor prescribed a malaria treatment but the medicine cost too much for Dieng, a 30-year-old tailor, so he went to an unlicensed street vendor for pills on the cheap.

"It was too expensive at the pharmacy. I was forced to buy street drugs as they are less expensive," he said. Within days he was hospitalized — sickened by the very drugs that were supposed to cure him.

Tens of thousands of people in Africa die each year because of fake and counterfeit medication, an E.U.-funded report released on Tuesday said. The drugs are mainly made in China but also in India, Paraguay, Pakistan and the United Kingdom.

ONITSHA, ANAMBRA (SUN NEWS ONLINE)--President of Ohanaeze Ndigbo Chief John Nnia Nwodo has said Igbo people will not fight again through armed struggle to achieve Biafra republic.

Nwodo, who spoke while delivering the 9th Convocation lecture of the Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University (COOU), at Igbariam campus, Anambra State, yesterday, described the Nigerian Biafran Civil War as the most devastating experience of Igbo with the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

Speaking on the topic: “The Igbo in the building of the Nigerian nation – the unrealised dreams,” he noted that the war claimed lives of millions of Igbo, while figures quoted by various reports on the war victims were totally unreliable, due to inaccessibility of data among Biafra.

Nwodo also recalled that several Igbo lost contact with their race and kinsmen during the war, when some of them were flown across some African countries while running f…

(THIS DAY NEWSPAPERS)--Nigerians in the diaspora remit over 15.8 billion pounds to the country annually, a study on ‘Nigeria Diaspora: Opportunities for Increasing the Development Impact of Nigeria’s Diaspora,’ has revealed.

The report which was conducted by the Dalberg Advisors on behalf of the Office of the Vice President, the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, revealed that the United States and the United Kingdom account for 45 per cent of all remittance inflows to the country while Lagos and the south west received over 67 percent of these.

“Of the 15.8 billion pounds remitted to Nigeria in 2015, members of the diaspora in the US contributed 4.3 billion pounds while those in the UK sent 2.8 billion pounds.

Presenting the report which was sponsored by the United Kingdom Department for International Development’s (DFID) Policy Development Facility, Programme Manager, PDF II,…

In this Sunday, Sept 9, 2018 file photo, health workers walk with a boy suspected of having the Ebola virus at an Ebola treatment centre in Beni, Eastern Congo. The World Health Organization says the risk of the deadly Ebola virus spreading from Congo is now "very high" after two confirmed cases were discovered near the Uganda border. The outbreak in northeastern Congo is larger than the previous one in the northwest and more complicated for health officials with insecurity from rebel groups. As of Friday, Sept. 28 there were 124 confirmed Ebola cases including 71 deaths. (AP Photo/Al-hadji Kudra Maliro, file)

BY LENA H. SUNWASHINGTON (THE WASHINGTON POST) - The United States has no plans to re-deploy personnel to fight the growing Ebola outbreak on the ground in Congo because of worsening security concerns, administration officials said Wednesday.

The outbreak in northeastern Congo is taking place in an active war zone and has now become the country's largest in more tha…

A worker collects cuttings from a marijuana plant at the Canopy Growth Corporation facility in Smiths Falls, Ontario, Canada, January 4, 2018. REUTERS/Chris WattieBY JOHN FOLEYNOVEMBER 16, 2018LAS VEGAS (REUTERS BREAKING VIEWS) - Las Vegas made its reputation on sin. So it might seem fitting that the cannabis industry chose to locate its biggest annual gathering in the city this week. And just as Vegas has used conferences to try to clean up its reputation – it’s now the venue for more than 21,000 confabs a year - the weed business is shifting in that direction, too. The drug remains federally prohibited in the United States, and less than a month has passed since Canada made it legal for adult use. But a veneer of acceptability has started to settle on the sector. It’s as if cannabis is trying on its first suit and tie.

The companies converging at the Marijuana Business Conference & Expo have outgrown their hoodies alarmingly fast. Aurora Cannabis and Canopy Growth added a stock …

LAGOS (VANGUARD)--In its quest to brace up with current trends in global affairs, the University of Lagos, UNILAG has unveiled the Institute of Nigeria-China Development Studies.

Speaking during the unveiling held at the Senate Chambers, UNILAG Vice-Chancellor, Professor Oluwatoyin Ogundipe said: ‘’This new institute will create multiple avenues for the studies of Chinese civilization, side by side Nigerian civilization.’’

According to him, there is a need for both Nigeria and Chinese civilizations to interact with a view towards identifying the strengths and weaknesses of each, so as to provide a platform for mutual growth.

Some of the objectives for establishing the Institute of Nigeria-China Development Studies, he pointed out include: ‘’ To become a resource centre for Chinese investors in Nigeria as well as for Nigerian businesses and individuals who wish to collaborate, cooperate or work with each other. To create conducive environments for con…

(COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATION)--Nigerians will go to the polls for elections in February and March 2019. In line with its mandate, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has reminded candidates that they are prohibited by law from campaigning before November 18, which marks ninety days before election day for federal offices, which is scheduled for February 16. Elections for state-level positions will take place on March 1 and campaigns will begin on December 2. The campaign period is a very delicate time and is often characterized by violence, abuse of power, hate speech, and corruption.

For the 2019 general elections at the federal level, Nigerians will elect a president and vice president, 109 Senators, and 360 members of the House of Representatives. In state level …

ABUJA (NEWS AGENCY OF NIGERIA)--The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission(EFCC) has boosted the Federal treasury with the sum of N1.37 billion, which no one stepped out to claim since August.
Justice A. Obiozor of the Federal High Court in Ikoyi, Lagos ordered the final forfeiture of the money, which was made up of N1,260,000,000, $327,132.35, £167.85 and €157.90.
The money which was kept at Heritage Bank Pls under the name of Secure Electronics Technology Limited, was seized by the EFCC, following an intelligence report from a whistleblower.
The company in whose possession the funds were found did not lay claim to them and it surrendered them for forfeiture.
In an affidavit in support of the application, the applicant stated that “Heritage Bank did not provide any legitimate explanation for the above transactions (involving the sums) and consequently returned the said money through 16 se…